About Sharyn Munro

Sharyn Munro lived for decades in a solar-powered mudbrick cabin on her remote mountain wildlife refuge in the NSW Upper Hunter Valley, the heart of her first two books, The Woman on the Mountain (Exisle 2007) and Mountain Tails (Exisle 2009).

Mother of two, grandmother of five, concern for their future drives Sharyn to use her very personal nonfiction style to reach beyond the converted. In The Woman on the Mountain, sustainability and global warming concerns mix with memoir, nature writing, and survival adventures with chainsaws or snakes. Threatened species is the theme underlying Mountain Tails, a self-illustrated collection of short pieces for animal lovers.

Her short stories have won many prizes, including The Alan Marshall Award; she writes regularly for The Owner Builder Magazine, and her essays have been published in the Griffith Review and famous reporter.

The very different Rich Land, Wasteland — how coal is killing Australia (Pan Macmillan/Exisle 2012) arose from her empathy with the people and places of the nearby Hunter Valley being devastated from runaway opencut coalmining. The aim of this self-designated ‘commonsense activist’ is to shock Australians into action, with the truth about coal and CSG. People have compared her book to Silent Spring in its passion, its exposure of issues and the possibility it may lead to a change in the way we treat our world.

In late 2014 she moved to a different mountain, closer to family, and with new wildlife to be discovered and chronicled in her blog. Sharyn is currently working on her newhttps://www.exislepublishing.com.au/Rich-Land-Wasteland.html book, almost a sequel to The Woman on the Mountain, to encompass the vast changes in her life and experience since 2007, not least the road trip for and the surviving of Rich Land, Wasteland.

The Woman on the Mountain A candid meander through my life on my remote mountain wildlife refuge, answering the oft-asked question of ‘Why do you live way out there’? – and how I became such a weird woman as to want to!

Mountain Tails Illustrated tales for animal lovers about the wild creatures who allowed me to share their living space — and a plea to look after them before it's too late.